Plenty of opportunities for art buyers during the Edinburgh International Festival

With the Edinburgh International Festival under way shortly, Colin Gleadell
takes a look at the accompanying exhibition programme.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Panzer V (Panthera Semi-Reducta)

By Colin Gleadell

5:40PM BST 22 Jul 2013

Is the Edinburgh International Festival a bit of a damp squib as far as selling art, rather than theatre tickets, is concerned? The festival gets under way soon, and with it comes an exhibition programme both in the public and the commercial galleries.

Though international, this art programme has a proudly Scottish flavour to it. The contemporary art superstar Peter Doig, born in Scotland, has a lead role with an exhibition of paintings from the past 10 years at the Scottish National Gallery. Doig is one of the world’s most expensive living artists, with an auction record of over £7.5 million. At the other end of the historical spectrum is an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland that tells the tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots through paintings, objects and documents.

Neither of them is a selling exhibition, but among those that are, many are focused on Scottish contemporary artists. At the Scottish Gallery is Paul Reid, the former Dundee student who was selected to travel to Turkey, Jordan and Canada with the Prince of Wales. Recent graduates of the Edinburgh College of Art are the subjects of solo exhibitions at the Edinburgh Printmakers gallery (the surreal humour of Rachel Maclean), and at the college itself (Paul Rooney).

Going back in time, the Open Eye gallery has a rare group of signed botanical prints for sale by the late artist and folk singer Rory McEwen, dated 1976, and has unearthed a trove of early drawings and paintings from the estate of the late Alberto Morrocco, who died in 1998, most of which have never been exhibited before. Traditional perhaps, but superbly accomplished and priced up to £48,000.

Morrocco was the son of Italian immigrants, and a particularly warm, Mediterranean-inspired painting of a watermelon seller is included in Bourne Fine Art’s thought-provoking historical survey, The Scottishness of Scottish Art. The exhibition traces the expression of Scottish national identity back to days following of the Act of Union, with portraits by Allan Ramsay and Sir Henry Raeburn, through to the later 20th-century brushes with European existentialism (Robert Colquhoun) and neo-expressionism (John Bellany).

A highlight en route is a crowded panorama of a fair that was catalogued as a work by the Irish artist William Turner de Lond when sold by Sotheby’s earlier this year, but is now established as a view of the Glasgow Fair in 1832 by the Scottish artist John Knox. The gallery discovered all this by consulting Knox’s great-great-great-great-nephew.

The timing of the exhibition is also significant in that it started a month before the festival opened. That, says Bourne Fine Art director Emily Walsh, is because so many of the gallery’s clients go away in August. As a result, half the works have been sold before the festival begins.

The suggestion that festival-goers are not art-buyers seems also to have affected the auction scene in and around Edinburgh in August. With Sotheby’s Gleneagles Hotel sales and Christie’s both long gone from the Scottish capital, Bonhams, too, has shifted its annual Scottish art sale in Edinburgh from August to September.

That leaves the field pretty much clear for Edinburgh-based auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull, which is fighting a rearguard action to engage the festival public with sales of affordable Scottish design and contemporary art on August 19 and 20. In their last contemporary art sale in April, Lyon & Turnbull successfully sold a large number of conceptually challenging works from the collection of Jane MacAllister, former deputy artistic director of the Richard Demarco gallery in Edinburgh, including multiples by Joseph Beuys and sculptures by the Romanian Artist Paul Neagu, one of which made a record £9,000.

This summer, they offer a strong selection of photography, including Eve Arnold’s shot of Marilyn Monroe and John Huston playing roulette, and a selection of works by Scotland’s renowned concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who died in 2006 and was recently the subject of a special display at Tate Britain.

Finlay’s camouflaged, mantelpiece-sized wooden tank, Panzer V, from 1977/9 is from a series in which ideas of beauty and destruction are enmeshed within a single object. A similar work is in the British Council collection, which points out that Finlay owned a letter from Albert Speer, the architect who was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, which extolled the beauty of tank design. Finlay also professed that camouflage was “the last and final form of classical painting”.

Perhaps, now, Finlay’s tank takes on a further significance which had not been intended, challenging the festival public to buy art. For an artist so well known and well represented – by Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery and London’s Victoria Miro Gallery – Finlay’s work is remarkably affordable, never having sold for more than £7,500 at auction before. Panzer V is estimated to fetch between £5,000 and £8,000, so might just top that.